Player’s Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons)

Everything a player needs to create heroic characters for the world’s greatest roleplaying game

The Player’s Handbook® is the essential reference for every Dungeons & Dragons® roleplayer. It contains rules for character creation and advancement, backgrounds and skills, exploration and combat, equipment, spells, and much more.

Use this book to create exciting characters from among the most iconic D&D® races and classes.

I am going to try to not duplicate the information provided in most of the other 5 star reviews because I agree with the vast majority of them. I am an oldster, have played every edition of D&D there has been, most of them being released when I was of legal drinking age, and IMO this is the best edition ever. I have not been this excited about a version of D&D since 2nd edition was released. It appears to me to have taken all the best, from a game design point of view, and most popular aspects of earlier editions and put them in one book. Another way to think of it is that this edition is the most true to the game principles set forth in the earlier editions, especially AD&D 1st and 2nd editions, while at the same time carrying the more modern and popular principles from 3.5 and even the much maligned 4.0.

I have to admit that I completely steered clear of the earlier play test versions, and was more than a little skeptical of the approach taken in getting feedback from so many play testers. I was worried that we would end up with a “too many cooks spoil the stew” situation; a game that was a convoluted mish-mash of everyone’s “favorite rules” creating an incoherent and largely unplayable mess. I am pleasantly surprised to say that I was 100% wrong about the effectiveness of the play test process and the finished product. Contrary to the opinions in some of the lower star reviews, what I am holding in my hands and have read cover to cover is a very “tight,” comprehensive, elegant, and fun set of rules.

Who is likely to like these rules? I think both the veteran player who cut his or her teeth on any version before 3.0, and a brand new player will like them. The mechanics most definitely have a “return to the basics that made the game great in the 70’s and 80’s” feel, while at the same time keeping a more elegant version of the more modern mechanics, like feats, attacks of opportunity, etc., that people generally love from 3.0 and later editions. For the most part, all of these things have been streamlined and made more elegant in application, but they are there.

I will end with my favorite thing about this book. A little background first to provide some context for my opinion. And let me say that this is just my opinion and some will disagree with me. For me, D&D started to trend downward in my enjoyment of the game at 2nd edition, and then it really did so at 3.0 and 3.5. For me, although I did not have the strong dislike for 4.0 that many people did, it just was not D&D to me anymore, I think primary because I had cut my teeth so much on 1st edition and the Basic and Expert sets in particular. D&D 5th edition has produced a steep positive trend for me for I think one general reason. When playing even 2nd edition, but very much so for 3.0, 3.5, and even 4.0, I found myself interacting with my character in the game more as a playing piece than a character in a story. Concerns about where to put skill points, and if a particular collection and order of choice for Feats began to dominate my thoughts and game choices. It was almost as if my character, and my decisions about playing the character, began to be dominated more by my interface with the rules in the book, rather than with my ideas about my character and my interaction with the game world. As my character advanced in level, I found that my focus on the book and what was written therein became more pronounced, not less as it did with earlier editions. As I reflected while playing these later editions, I found that I was not really playing a character, but instead was playing a set of rules. So far, the gift that 5th edition has given to me is a change in focus. My character has again become a protagonist in an adventure story, rather than a playing piece. I worry now more about the choices and decisions I make while interacting with the game world, and those choices making the character fun to play, rather than fretting over whether or not I have chosen the right Feats or if my modifier for a particular skill is as high as I want it to be. The way that races, and even classes, are discussed, the used of a character’s background and the ideals, personality characteristics, etc. that are randomly determined from the background choice, and the lack of mathematical modifiers except for the familiar ability modifier, and the soon to be ubiquitous global proficiency modifier, instead using the elegant advantage/disadvantage mechanic all have worked to focus my attention back on my character as protagonist. For that I want to thank the play testers and writers of 5th edition. For me this has been the most nostalgic aspect of the rules, not so much the mechanics per se.

Do I like all of the rules? Absolutely not. Frankly, I think that is impossible to attain and do not expect that from any set of rpg rules. To me that’s not fair to expect that of the…

So, the fifth edition of the venerable Dungeons and Dragons game is officially out, with the Player’s Handbook ready to be picked up, combed through and played by the world. Is it good?

I think it’s good. I think it’s a great implementation of all of the game’s best and most beloved ideas. I think it might be my favorite edition yet.

To give a little background (and you can feel free to skip this paragraph if you want to get to the meat of the review), I started with 3rd edition, which came out all the way back in 2000, when I was in middle school. I played it through high school and college, and enjoyed it well enough, but eventually the weight of its mechanics began to grate on me. By the end I gave up on 3rd edition, finding it bloated and horrendously inelegant. When 4th edition was released in `08, I was excited. I bought all the books at once and devoured them. I wasn’t sold on the powers mechanics and the intense focus on combat, but my buddies and I tried it out. We gave up after a couple months and I sold the books. It was okay, but not my cup of tea. In the end, I, like a lot of folks, gained interest in the older editions of the games, the ones that predated my own D&D experiences, the ones that sounded to me like ancient, esoteric and arcane books of mystery, whose rambling prose and absurdly convoluted mechanics became somehow enticing. We played a little bit of the older editions, mostly the old Basic edition of the game, and had a lot of fun, though it was more due to the ability to ignore the rules entirely than to any intended strength of the system. Still, after a few games we gave up on tabletop roleplaying games all together. I tried to get into more of the indie side of the RPG genre, taking a particular interest in Burning Wheel, which I still adore as a system, though it seems too unwieldy and I was and remain hesitant to actually try and play it.

But now, after a few years of my own indifference, D&D is back. The Starter Set for fifth edition came out last month, and I bought it right away. For some reason, after years of total uninterest in Dungeons and Dragons, where any mention of the game would make me turn up my nose at such inelegant, fiddly silliness, I found myself, all at once, filled with overwhelming excitement about the coming edition. The promise of a game, both old and new, divorced from the flaws of the past, made with some fresh ideas and streamlining, aiming to take the best of each old edition and instill them into a unified whole that is at once simple, quick and varied? It filled my little heart with unexpected delight. I bought the Starter Set on the day it was released in select stores, and I was not let down. See my review of the Starter Set for details on that.

Fifth edition is, so far, and this is not hyperbole, exactly what I want the game of Dungeons and Dragons to be. The Player’s Handbook is an excellent book and a perfect example of this edition’s quality so far. It is concise and complete, including all of the classic archetypes and races of the past, adding some new ones and nowhere stating, “Wait for this later release before you can play your favorite class or race.”

The high level of quality starts with the art design and cover, which are probably my favorite for any edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The full-cover art is great: a dynamic work, depicting movement and, for once, presenting a properly dressed adventurer woman, who, against all odds, fearlessly takes on a massive fire giant, and whose form, though significantly dwarfed by the giant’s, seems just as threatening and powerful and dare I say bad-ass. It is an evocative piece, and really sets the tone for the rest of the book. This is a game about adventure, a game about facing the odds and somehow getting through to the other side, victorious–or dead, possibly, since abruptly losing is always a risk when one plays a dice game.

The pages are slick and clean, with a good amount of art, a lot of it full-page, which I quite enjoyed. The quality varies, and while some of the illustrations of halflings look odd to say the least, my overall impression was good. The art was evocative and reminiscent of illustrations of old, presenting a world that actively looked medieval as opposed to anime or steampunk or some amalgamation of traditions and time periods that managed to look disjointed and awkward at best. But when I say that there is no anime, do not despair! That does not mean that everyone depicted is a pale-faced european. Quite the opposite in fact. I commend the Wizards team for not only depicting a good number of people of color in the book, but also having some of those people–and others–dressed in garb that is obviously non-western and doing so without being exploitative or resorting to stereotypes. When we open the book we can see that Dungeons and Dragons is a game of vaguely feudal societies, but whose inspirations…

I’m sold. Not only is it meaty and high quality, but WotC did a terrific job of taking traditional D&D and modernizing it in numerous ways without changing it beyond recognition. It’s very quintessentially old school D&D for the 21st century. Even the art is spot on, IMO.

I’m a huge fan of the renovated Vancian casting, the powerful feats, and the myriad class options (I can play a semi-magical Fighter without muticlassing!). New rules are typically either flavorful additions (like Inspiration or various class-unique mechanics), or are very elegant solutions to problems that persisted throughout earlier editions (like Advantage/Disadvantage). The numeric scaling is on a shallower curve than both 3rd and 4th, which I love because it’s more ‘realistic’ and also more flexible with regard to encounter balance. I also like how they divorced magic items from the core system. Magical equipment was so heavily structured into 4e’s core system that magic items and gearing became trite and uninteresting, the opposite feeling it is supposed to elicit.

My main concern during the playtest period was that they were going to discard my favorite innovations of 4th edition since it was controversial, such as rituals, better healing systems, non-magical powers, and the new planes, but they managed to integrate many of the best aspects of 4th very fluidly with a system that is overall much more reminiscent of older editions.

Other than highly subjective, nitpicky things (Bards with 9 level spell progression? hmm…..) my only complaints so far revolve around minor missing features or rules that are likely to be introduced in future books, such as better feat options and more optional rules to simulate grit/realism, like an injury system.

I highly, highly recommend this to people even remotely interested in D&D or getting into RPGs, or to people who are even slightly tired of whatever system they’ve been using.